SIP: Ready for Prime Time

By Richard Tehrani, Publisher's Outlook

The SIP market is maturing nicely as evidenced by the massive scale of today's SIP-based applications. After all if SIP applications are not able to scale and carriers and large enterprises aren't able to purchase off-the-shelf software to enable such communications, what is the point?

Sure you can write your own SIP-based applications but it is better to have choices in any market and not everyone wants to start from scratch.

We need SIP systems to scale to the largest implementations as inexpensively as possible so session initiation protocol-based solutions can be deployed all over the world and interact with one another.

I believe one day SIP (or a SIP successor) will be a ubiquitous protocol and when this happens the world will be better off as there will be widespread interoperability. Now, I am not an expecting instant communications utopia to magically appear, mind you - we all know full well that one implementation of SIP may vary from another making them incompatible.

Recently I was pleasantly surprised to see the results of a test by CT Labs of CommuniGate System's (news - alert) SIP-based CommuniGate Pro. If you aren't aware of CommuniGate, their technology allows the delivery of rich media-enabled Internet communications in a flexible manner that carriers require.

CT labs put the software through its paces and the results were very positive.

The test emulated an active subscriber base of unique SIP user agents engaging in real-world call activities. This was accomplished by generating realistic levels of SIP endpoint registrations, peer-to-peer VoIP calls, and application server traffic for various sizes of an active subscriber base.

For each tested CommuniGate Pro configuration, CT Labs discovered the maximum number of subscribers that could be supported without failed calls, excessive call answer or application navigation latencies, detectable voice or application prompt quality issues, or other types of service degradation that would be deemed unacceptable by a typical user.

The duration of each test varied depending on the goal and the traffic conditions created. Longer tests were executed to assess the long-term reliability of the CommuniGate Pro architecture.

CommuniGate Pro was found to provide excellent overall performance when subjected to the real-world residential traffic model. This two-server CommuniGate Pro All Active Dynamic Cluster configuration, utilizing an external NAS device for shared storage, supported over 220,000 active users without a single call or registration failure during the test runs.

It would certainly seem the above test provides validation for service providers that CommuniGate Pro is a platform that can be trusted to perform under demanding conditions.

In a second phase of the benchmark with a single server, a test verified that the CommuniGate Pro (CGP) product supports a large subscriber base on a single low-cost server. This was proven through an examination of the performance results for call connectivity, registrations, and voice prompt quality. With a resulting call throughput of 7,200 calls per hour, the CGP call processing architecture was found to perform reliably during peak traffic conditions.

So there is great progress being made in the SIP server space and it looks like CommuniGate is helping corporations and service providers alike in furthering open, Internet communications regardless of media type.